The Life of Prayer

Several weeks ago, I spoke to the RCIA class at St Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Church (Charlotte, NC) on the topic of prayer as presented in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. My focus was on the prayers of Sacred Scripture, and how these form the bedrock of the traditional prayer life of the Church. This seems like a good topic for our “Catholic Life and Devotion” series at Called to Communion, so here is the audio recording of that talk (the written outline is included below):

I was particularly pleased to participate in the RCIA class at St Thomas Aquinas because this parish has extended great hospitality to my own home church, St Basil the Great Ukrainian Greek Catholic Mission, allowing us to use their chapel for our Sunday liturgies and other feast days, and to arrange the chapel for the particular needs of the Byzantine liturgy. This is truly a case of the one Church “breathing with both lungs” (Eastern and Western), and it has been one of the great joys of my own “Catholic life and devotion” to be a part of this mutual action at first hand, on the local level.

The brethren asked Abba Agathon: ‘Amongst all our different activities, father, which is the virtue that requires the greatest effort?’ He answered: ‘Forgive me, but I think that there is no labour greater than praying to God. For every time a man wants to pray, his enemies the demons try to prevent him; for they know that nothing obstructs them so much as prayer to God. In everything else that a man undertakes, if he perseveres, he will attain rest. But in order to pray a man must struggle to his last breath. (From The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, as quoted by Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, p. 105.)